1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to the field of information handling system display peripherals, and more particularly to a system and method for presenting visual information at plural display devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Information handling systems often run applications having a primary goal of presenting information to an end user as visual images. Typically, applications running on a central processing unit (CPU) generate visual information in a compressed or only partly-processed format. The visual information is forwarded from the CPU to a graphics processing unit (GPU) that is typically supported on a daughter card generally known as a graphics card. The GPU completes the processing of the visual information to a format that is used by a display to present the visual information as visual images. Early information handling systems presented visual images by generating analog television signals that were output by analog televisions. Eventually, in order to provide greater resolution of the visual images at the display, analog signal standards were developed to communicate visual image pixel information from the information handling system to the display, such as the CGA, EGA, VGA and SVGA standards. As digital processing components became more powerful, industry developed standards for providing visual information in digital formats, such as the DVI and more recently the DisplayPort standards. With digital formats, a graphics card on the information handling system outputs pixel information in digital form, which a processor on the display uses to define the color output at each pixel.
Generally, in order to communicate information to a display device, an information handling system graphics card couples to the display device with a cable or, in the case of portable systems having an integrated display, a bus/serial link. Information handling systems sometimes support remote presentation of visual information by communication of the visual information through a network interface, although the visual information is typically too large to communicate except in compressed form. DisplayPort does support some limited ability to communicate uncompressed visual information since the DisplayPort pixel information is communicated in packets. Under the DisplayPort standard, the information handling system graphics card acts as a source device that transmits visual information packets and the display device acts as a sink device that receives the visual information packets. The source device is designated as an output device that drives, amplifies and encodes the visual information for streaming to the sink device. The sink device decodes the visual information and generates visual images by applying the visual information to pixels of the display device. Generally, in order to provide visual information to plural displays, a source device couples to each device, such as a graphics card in an information handling system or, in some instances, a dedicated repeater-type of device that re-drives, amplifies and encodes or trans-codes visual information. Current architectures require significant external components having substantial costs to distribute visual information content over long distances. Such architectures typically are confusing and difficult to set up.